(AP) - The Coen Brothers are such a distinctive cinematic brand that an amusing parlor game is to anticipate how they would respond to various story scenarios. How would the Coens handle a bear-baiting Elizabethan intergenerational saga? Probably with Frances McDormand as the bear trainer. Or how about a traveling Lithuanian circus freak show romantic comedy? If anyone could pull off a sexy bearded lady, McDormand would be it.

When you learn, then, that Joel and Ethan Coen decided to take on the Washington-spy-thriller genre, as they do in the silly and mostly satisfying "Read Before Burning," the premise alone is probably enough to coax a grin. While the brothers have focused much of their creative energy over the years on delving more into this great nation's wacky and far from cosmopolitan wide-open spaces -- from "Fargo" to "O Brother How Art Thou" -- it seems only fitting that they focus their energies inside the Beltway for a change.

What better way than a chipper CIA misadventure?

With Frances McDormand in all her glory, of course.

Overall, the Coens mostly deliver, bringing together many of their trademark elements: a first-rate ensemble cast, a decidedly oblique sense of humor, a twisted trail of criminal behavior, a shocking splash of violence and an overall taste for taking pompous officialdom down a notch or two. While it doesn't rank up there in the first tier of Coen classics -- and that's a pretty difficult club to break into these days -- the film is a fairly diverting 90-minute romp.

As the film opens, we meet Osborne Cox (a crusty John Malkovich), a washed-up CIA analyst who has just found out he's been demoted because of his drinking problem. Furious, he quits to write his "memoirs." What he doesn't realize is that his wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton, oozing uptightness), who is having an affair with the neighborhood Don Juan (George Clooney), has copied those memoirs in an effort to get his financial records for their impending divorce, and the document falls into the wrong hands.

Those hands turn out to belong to two of the most incompetent amateur sleuths that Washington has ever seen: a cosmetic-surgery-obsessed Linda Litzke (McDormand) and a vapid Chad Feldheimer (a goofy Brad Pitt), who are personal fitness trainers at the local gym.

The bumbling that ensues has a laid-back, Woody Allenish feel to it: tangled romantic relationships, mistaken assumptions, wrong turns. The best parts are the choice directorial flourishes and acting choices that pop up in the smallest places: the way that Swinton rolls her eyes when Malkovich's character tells her he wants to write a book; Pitt's penchant for running his hands through his bleached hair; the petulant method with which Clooney bounds up two stairs at a time.

Could there be anything more stirring than the sight of an enraged Malkovich furiously barreling along a pier wearing a paisley dressing gown, boxer shorts and carrying a hatchet?

Yet there's something about the film that remains stubbornly surface-level, with some characters that really connect (such as McDormand's) and others that remain more on the level of tics and silliness (such as Pitt's). Unlike past Coen classics, in which the brothers created slivers of worlds so exotic and vivid that you couldn't help getting sucked in, "Burn After Reading" is decidedly lower-key, content to merely amble around our nation's capital like a contented tourist.

Related Stories

Featured Story

Get 'Today's Front Page' in your inbox

This newsletter is sent every morning at 6 a.m. and includes the morning's top stories, a full list of obituaries, links to comics and puzzles and the most recent news, sports and entertainment headlines.

optionalCheck here if you do not want to receive additional email offers and information.See our privacy policy

Thank you for signing up for 'Today's Front Page'

To view and subscribe to any of our other newsletters, please click here.